Bart D. Ehrman: How Did Christianity Take Over the Roman World?

[Music] welcome to misquoting Jesus with Bart ehrmann the only show where a six-time New York Times best-selling author and world-renowned Bible scholar uncovers the many fascinating little-known facts about the New Testament the historical Jesus and the rise of Christianity I'm your host Megan Lewis let's begin Christianity started out with a handful of followers in about 30 CE Jesus disciples and some female supporters it was essentially a small offshoot of Judaism viewed with suspicion and hostility in under 300 years that number exploded to around two to three million people and included the emperor of the Roman Empire among its members what was it about Christianity that made conversion such a compelling choice for so many polytheistic people before we get to the topic at hand but hello how are you doing today yeah I'm doing fine uh my um when this when this episode plays uh we'll uh I will be two days away from leaving England I've been here all summer and um I um going back because classes are starting and uh they you know they like me to be there for that since it's my day job and so I'm getting getting prepped to teach and uh getting back into that Rhythm and uh so it's a very different Rhythm but it's you know it's it's the perk of the job being able to teach undergraduates it's a really great great privilege and I just I I like it all I I just like it I really like it is it hard to change gears from a summer of research and writing to going back into teaching yeah it is I mean it's just it's um for all sorts of reasons because the day job you know involves more than just kind of showing up in a classroom and teaching uh because it's just there's all there's lots of stuff that's you you know it's kind of hard to lay it all out but it's you know it's a lot of administrative stuff and it's and it's doing grunt work that um but it's also it is trying you know it's getting excited again about topics and meeting new students and getting involved and uh so it's it's just a whole different kind of thing than than reading and writing which is what I you know Reading Writing and speaking that's kind of what I do otherwise and uh for the for the teaching I just I have to do some reading but it's courses I've taught a million times and it's and it's a lot of a lot of interaction so it's different yeah so so right so uh how and how are you doing um when this goes out I will still be in the middle of kids summer holidays so they're all having fun probably making a lot of noise making a lot of mess as children should do during the summer holidays I remember lots of noise and mess when I was a kid so it's certainly carrying on a tradition um and right at the end of August I'll be going to uh Canada with my husband he's speaking at a conference um on atheism so he'll be I think talking about slavery in the Bible so we'll be getting ready to head out yeah it'll be fun where in Canada is it I'm honestly I think it's Ontario but I'm not 100 sure um this is one of the trips where I just will get in the car and yeah end up it's north of you not on the other side of the country yes no because we're driving yeah no it's not like going to Vancouver no we'll be we'll be driving upstairs love it no it's Canada's great I really I love Canada so okay good have fun oh it's yeah it'll be good it'll be good um but before I get to Canada and before you start teaching again we need to talk about Christianity taking over the Roman Empire so we've spoken about the religious Norms of the Roman Empire during Christianity's early days before and most people were Pagan they worshiped a variety of gods and participated in the cultic life of their community and correct me if I'm wrong but I remember you saying that religion was more a set of practices than theological doctrines for for the Pagan community and prior to Christians really the only religious group that demanded and any kind of exclusivity from their followers with the the Jewish community so Christians were really the new kids and their insistence that their God was the only God wasn't normal is that right oh boy is that right right yeah because even Jews I mean even Jews um most Jews were not insistent that their God was the only God it was more that this this is our God and we're his people and you know they thought that he was superior but the the there there were there were Jews who were complete monotheists who said you know there is only one God but a lot of Jews you know even those who said that weren't interested in anybody else joining them in the worship of this God this was their God and so uh it was different with the Christians and we'll we'll definitely get to that missionary aspect of Christianity earlier but having kind of pointed out a couple of the major differences between Christianity and what was the norm at the time um there was a way of thinking that again I think you mentioned in the last episode that helped to pave the way for some pagans to convert to Christianity so would you mind just explaining what henotheism is and how it could have helped ease some pagans into this this monotheistic worldview yeah so henotheism is um is not it's it's it's a kind of religiosity that is similar to monotheism but with a distinctive difference so polytheism of course is the belief in many gods or the worship of many gods uh monotheism is the insistence there's only one God and hanotheism says there are other gods but there's one God that I that I'm going to worship uh and not to you know it wasn't it was not very broad within the the Roman world uh the Greek and the Roman worlds it was um it was found in parts of Judaism Judaism starts out as henotheistic when even in the Ten Commandments when the you know depending how you number The Ten Commandments the first commandment in some numerations is you shall have no other gods before me and that that is not a Commandment that says You must believe there's only one God it quite the contrary it's assuming there are other gods so the Commandment is not that uh you shall Worship You Shall Believe In only one God the Commandment is you should not worship any Gods ahead of me so there are other gods but none of them are superior or to be worshiped instead of Yahweh the god of Israel So within Judaism you you get hanotheism you do get hennotheism within parts of uh the Pagan world as well though um there's a there's a kind of a religion that was floating around the Roman Empire about the time of the beginning of Christianity uh in the first several years centuries of Christianity that was um a worship of a God that was sometimes didn't have a name sometimes it was this God was just called The Hip systos Theos which means in Greek means the highest God and the worshipers of this highest God believe that this was the most powerful most all-knowing the most everything God and that who was Superior to all the other gods and since this one was Superior that's the one that they would worship and so when Christians came along and said uh you know there is one God this resonated with people who knew about these others who who thought there was only one God so it's it's not completely out of the ordinary for there to be a supreme Gods thought of in in the ancient world and with different ancient Cults we mentioned very briefly earlier that uh early Christianity was very much a missionary religion and I think a lot of modern Christianity still is was this drive to convert people also something that would have been familiar to pagans in the Roman world or was it peculiar to Christianity well so I would say that the heenotheism was something that you know some people knew about the idea of evangelism was something like whoa what that was not that was that's not what happens um you know evangelizing for your God is kind of like trying to convince people to leave their Hometown and come to your city that this is the only place I I know some New Yorkers who believe that this is this is the Blaze and you know you really need to move to New York but basically this isn't even on our our radar that you favor one seed and say it's the only only place to be and mean it seriously but it's because the the Pagan religions were polytheistic and they they they supported the worship of many gods and didn't insist on the worship of just one God um the only place in the Roman and Greek world where you really get something like conversion where people insist this is the right way and you need to be like this is not in the realm of religion or traditional religions it's in the realm of philosophy um philosophers in uh in Antiquity took various stands and they were in different schools of thought so in the about the the time of the of early Christianity there were there were followers of Plato uh platonists and their followers of of Aristotle still even though this is centuries earlier but you have groups like The stoics and the epicureans and the cynics and there there are these various groups of philosophers and their followers who believe that they have the right understanding of what it means to live a good life and to live well and to enjoy life and they had different views about that and they were in each other's throats sometimes and they maligned each other and attacked each other but but and they tried to get converts because they thought that you know if you don't if you don't understand how to live well you're going to be miserable and so they were trying to urge people to to follow their philosophical views and so these philosophical groups were missionary in that sense it it wasn't related to the worship of the Gods is there is related to their understanding of how you ought to live but the Christians are kind of like that because they're insisting you've got to live a Christian life and it's not unlike the philosophers it's not so that you'll not simply so that you'll be have a contented live it's so that you'll have an afterlife a good afterlife I see thank you now in Pagan religions we've already said if you decided to worship another God there wasn't a requirement to stop worshiping one that you were already worshiping and obviously Christianity was different how important was this kind of exclusivity clause in the growth of Christianity um and it it in one of your books you mentioned that obviously for each convert to Christianity there was one more Christian and one less Pagan which must have had an impact yeah boy did it yeah so this you know I want to I want to be clear that these things that we're talking about now these are not my ideas I wrote a book on in the try my book the Triumph of Christianity this this kind of this issue of exclusivity I got from a a very important scholar of early Christianity uh Ramsey McMullen who was a professor at uh at Yale uh University in the classics department but he his he argued that um this business of Christian exclusivity was really important because as as we've said the in the Pagan religions there's nothing like that if you were worshiping Zeus that that didn't preclude you from worshiping uh Aries or Apollo or or artema so you you just Worship You worship the gods that you feel would be most useful for you you worship your household gods and you worship your city gods and your and so you're worshiping a lot of gods um and nobody insisted that you worship their God uh so you know if you decide not to worship Zeus that's that's fine if you've got your own Gods they they sometimes were they did Want You To Worship the city gods or the state Gods but they weren't they weren't particularly fussy about it and there was no idea there was one God you had to worship uh Jews did worship their own God but again they weren't out trying to make converts and so it didn't really make much of an impact but when you have a religion that believes in trying to convert converting people to their View and insists that their view is the only right View that combination of evangelism and exclusivity has a very powerful effect there was nothing like it in the Empire but you know it meant that over time as people did come to the Christian faith they were leaving all the other faiths unlike the other faiths where the other religions if a lot more people start worshiping Apollo it doesn't stop people from worshiping zoos but if you become Christian you stop being Pagan and it has this kind of has this interesting effect that most people wouldn't have thought of that McMullen makes a deal of that I think is absolutely right and so just as an analogy he doesn't quite put it this way but as an analogy suppose you and I are both uh gung-ho for our particular religion and um you you are a Christian who believes that that Christ is the only way that the god of Jesus is the only God and I'm I'm a worshiper of Apollo and I think Apollo is great but Apollo's you know people a lot of worship Apollo and suppose this would never happen because pagans were not missionaries but if suppose you and I go into a town and we get a group of about 100 people and uh and all of them are pagan they worship various Gods but none of them worships Apollo and none of them worships Jesus or the god of Jesus and so suppose we both give a presentation and suppose we're equally convincing okay we're equally convincing if we are equally convincing then out of that hundred people Christians gain 50 converts and lose no one paganism loses 50 people and gains no one and so there's no Christianity can't lose and like that you don't and the realities we're going to see the reality you don't have to convince half of them you have to convince a couple of them and you do that for a few hundred years and it takes off suddenly there are there are no pagans left with this exclusivity of I mean it must have seemed very strange to a pagan audience did it not act as a deterrent for potential converts um I think it did for some and maybe for a lot we have a number of pagan opponents of Christianity who ridicule this idea even into the time when uh in the in the fourth Century for example when you start getting lots of people converting because you know if you have a if you have a ready to grow it suppose you've got five percent of the five of the percent of the people you talk to every year convert or even one percent well you know after after a number of years those start adding those numbers because if you've got 10 people you talk to and you convert you know 10 of them that means you know you got one but if you're talking to a hundred people then you got 10 and you've got a thousand people got 100 so the more you get the more the rate you know the numbers keep growing so um so what happens is when the numbers are taken off you get these intellectuals who are pagan who really find Christianity offensive and their line is very much what you're suggesting where they say look what's this exclusivity there are lots of ways to the Divine you know they're not one way to to to the Divine there are lots of paths and you all are just you know you're nuts what do you mean there's only one way why would that be and so yeah it was an issue for the opponents what then would a Christianity do we have like lots of full-time missionaries going out from churches or does it work in a different way right this is this is something that's interesting and again that people probably wouldn't expect I mean what I think probably people would expect is that you have all these missionaries being sent out you know that the apostles go out and they preach the gospel they convert people and they're they commission them to become a missionaries and they go out and they become missionaries and and and so forth the reality is we don't know of very many missionaries in in Christianity in the first 400 years we hardly know of any and Paul was one and Paul mentions some other cephas and so so on but between Paul and the emperor Constantine you can count the number of people that we know of who are missionaries on one hand in the entire Roman Empire and so there may have been missionaries but they were they're not really talked about much we also tend to think that um we we when we try to imagine like how do you convert like masses of people we tend to think well you got to have a lot of conversions at once and so you know you just you must have Billy Graham rallies or something and you must have like a thousand people at once I mean how do you get from 20 people to 3 million people in 300 years without converting the masses and that would require Evangelistic rallies but there were no Evangelistic rallies and it turns out that probably there weren't even people getting up on their soapbox and preaching in the public forum that's the other thing you'd expect like you know somebody goes into town and gets up and starts preaching to the crowd that doesn't seem to be what happened either the mechanics is really pretty interesting it's one person tells another and converts them over time it's it's it's personal Connections in conversation that appears to be how it happened and what Scholars have done is they've devised this understanding of how that can work by Network Theory this is a theory within theoretical discourse within sociology and such that that you and I have a lot of contacts with people you know we have friends we have family we have neighbors we have work Associates and we have these webs of of connection and if you are trying to convince somebody of something you're not just convincing one person you have these webs and these webs if you start converting different people in different parts of the web they convert other people in different parts of the web and it spreads like that and so it appears like that it's Word of Mouth one person converting a number over a long time and then that person converting other people converts other people but maybe one person in a family was converted and they go along to and they go on to bring their entire family through as well so that one conversion or not maybe not instantly but quite quickly Nets another five six seven people uh that that absolutely did happen and it happened in a way that wouldn't happen today very much at least in American culture and it has to do with the structure of the family in the Roman world uh in the Roman World families tended to be extended it wasn't just a nuclear family but you lived with um you know you lived with your with parents and grandparents and children and uh servants and slaves and the household would be you know it would be a unit and the uh the city was organized as kind of a big family a big organizational unit and as in the city you've got you've got administrator you've got to head honcho in the family the the father of the family the the the bread Warner winner the the Father the Potter families he was called the Potter families the father of the family he made decisions about um the family's uh social life and religious life and so the Potter families would decide what kind of religious practices the family would engage in that means if for example just early on if the Apostle Paul converted a man in Corinth who had a family so he'd have a wife and say you'd have a couple kids and uh and a couple slaves maybe and so I mean it might be eight people in there nine people if if you convert this man he puts Christianity onto his family and the family becomes Christian even in the New Testament it says you know she converted and all her household he converted and all his household it's because the the head of the family whoever it is so um now people people might object to that and say look you've got a guy who converts and then he like his wife she's not really converting she's doing what he tells her to do and that that would be right but over time she's going to join in too because this is the worship she gets to know and she then the kids and then and so the family you convert one person you convert seven or eight people if you convert them and so part of that is how it's spreading Christianity that over time so many people were willing to forego all of their prior religious commitments and practices um this is one of the leading questions that Scholars have wrestled with for a very long time you know how what was it about Christianity that made it succeed um and there are a lot of theories about that that have been floated around uh both uh among Scholars and in the general population the old view that was pretty common 100 years ago or so was that paganism for longer than that paganism was obviously a bankrupt set of religions you've got all these Gods they're doing all sorts of crazy things they got these myths these gods have an adultery and and committing murder and and being you know just doing nasty things and and nobody could believe that stuff come on and so the idea there was that the Pagan religions were failing and that Christianity then came to fill the void there's a vacuum created by the failure of paganism and so and uh one variation of that that you hear frequently today is that Christianity was just obviously Superior it's obviously better to have one God instead of a bunch of gods and it's better to have a Bible than not to have a Bible and and so um so those are theories that uh many people have but I but they they don't go into appear to be right at all paganism we know now from we know from the archaeological record among other things was thriving in the period and most people had no problem with their religion and religiosity was going along just fine when Christianity came along so that wasn't it and most people didn't look at Christianity and say oh there's something Superior they thought it was crazy and so we might have an episode or two on how crazy they thought it was and why and how that got manifested but but the um so that wasn't it so what so what was it um there as I said there are a lot a lot of theories about that and some things College have to decide was Christianity more or less appealing depending on what social group you were coming from well um yes and no I mean it kind of it ha it has to do it actually that question has to do with what it was the Christianity you know what probably did make it appeal because some of the theories are things like here's a comment there here's a common theory too that you'll hear a lot which is that Christianity provided a way for uh lower class people to come together uh on occasion and to celebrate their lives together and provided help for those who are in need in the community um so the idea is that you know Rich folk they get along fine just by themselves and in the ancient world Rich folk May mainly stuck to themselves we don't have a lot of public charity or governmental support for the poor or can even concern for the poor among the rich in the ancient world they had a different way of doing things and so the theory here is that uh since you know the vast majority of the world is poor if if they the in the Christian communities they come together and the Christians believe in helping the poor and taking care of those who are defenseless and uh providing what people need for the homeless and for the hungry and the Christians did that and so this theory is that that Christianity provided kind of social safety Network that wasn't available within the society at large and Outsiders realized that and they realized they could have their needs met if they would join the church and so they joined the church and so that's you know that that's a theory that a lot of people have and and some Scholars have suggested it as well but there's a problem with it there are lots of problems with it actually I mean it seems appealing it seems and you know maybe that happens sometime but in my book the Triumph of Christianity I try to explain why that probably isn't it that's probably not why Christianity succeeded for one thing whenever converts uh on record talk about why they converted that's never the reason that's given um they don't talk about that they don't talk about uh you know they they don't talk about the benefits within the community and before Constantine most of the Christian communities were closed it wasn't like having the Methodist Church on the on the corner that you could just go to on Sunday morning Christians were worshiping with Christians and uh Outsiders you know we're kind of left out in the dark and for in terms of what was happening on the inside so I don't I don't think there's a lot of that going on uh and so I'm not sure that that's the explanation so what other explanations have people come up with in there are there any that seem to more fully account for the the data that that exists from the ancient world well I'll tell you one that's really interesting that I think doesn't work at all and then I'll tell you the one that I think works the one that I don't think works at all was uh there there was uh a book called The the rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark it's a very interesting book He's a sociologist of modern religion so he's not an expert in Antiquity but he applied his sociological knowledge to early Christianity and one of the the things he argued is that Christianity succeeded because they had Superior Health Care well that's not one I've heard before no I know and but his arm his argument was that Studies have shown that simple nursing even apart from modern medicine simple nursing increases survival rates of when people are ill deathly ill and he points out that in the early Christian sources we're told that when a big plague would come along I mean there were some plagues and at the end of the third Century there was a plague uh during the random markets Aurelius that made makes covet look like kindergarten play I mean it it killed oh my God it killed a huge percentage of the population and uh we have people who were riding at the period and Christians said you know these pagans they know that if they get in contact with an ill person that um they'll they'll get it and so the pagans were leaving their families to die and not taking care of them whereas Christians are going in to help and and so Rodney Stark says so they'll probably survived more so by the end of the plague there were more Christians you know and that that was his theory and it's a great it's a great Theory I really like the theory but there's no way it works because what happens is when the Christians go in to take care of the sick people they get this they get the disease and so the Christians were dying off more they weren't dying off less and and in fact the sources say precisely that they don't say what he says the Christian Services said yeah well you know uh you know we're so dedicated we'll go in and nurse you know somebody we love and then they'd carry us out next oh God so uh yeah so they're they're all sorts of explanations like that that don't work I think so which is the one that you think does work right um this again is a view that Ramsay McMullen uh developed and I think is absolutely right um it has to do with why people worship the Gods in the first place Christians were not simply inventing a new religion that was nothing like anything anybody had heard before there were similarities between Christianity and other religions and the biggest similarity is why are you worshiping the Gods well why do pagans worship the gods because the gods can provide things for them that they cannot provide for themselves they can't make sure it rains uh you know I can't make sure it rains I can't make sure my crop grow I have no way to make corn grow per se I mean I can watch it grow and I can do what I would say but I can't make it grow I can't make my livestock reproduce I can't make sure my wife doesn't die in childbirth I can't make sure the infant doesn't die I can't make sure I win these this War I mean the things that Keep Us Alive we can't control only the gods can control so the pagans worship the gods because the gods could control things that the people couldn't control themselves it was all about divine power not in a cynical way at all not in a cynical way at all but that's you know you worship God because God is superior and can help you and so in in the um in the Pagan World there was this kind of there's this Latin phrase just three words um and the idea is that you would worship the gods by like sacrificing to them giving them offerings you would do that to them so that they would do something for you do means I give UT in order that days you might give so I'm doing this sacrifice for you to honor you so that you might help me in my situation here okay so pagans are worshiping because they believe that the gods are powerful and able to help them what if you have a new religion that comes along that argues that their God is far more powerful than your gods and then all gods put together we'll if they convince you of that then of course you'll worship that God that's why you're worshiping the Gods and so what Christians are doing uh By Word of Mouth you know not in Evangelistic rallies or probably not on soap boxes but we're but one family member to the neighbor who talks to her neighbor is telling stories about how powerful the Christian God is and that the Christian God can heal people that the Christian God can control the weather that last week my daughter had a very serious illness and uh the my my Christian friend came in and prayed over her and she got better just like that and um you know we we had this drought the reason this drought and this these Christians over here were praying they they're the ones who ended this trout and so uh and and you know you come out and you say look our religion is based on God raising somebody from the dead that's how powerful it is so powerful than that what is more powerful than that moreover our our Apostles can do that they've raised people from the dead so what you do is you convince them your God is more powerful and if they you you don't have to convince a lot of people you convince a couple people and uh over time those couple people convert a couple people convert and every time somebody converts they leave paganism and it's the only religion doing that that's taking people out of one set of religious Traditions into their own slightly related to to the idea of the power of God I think is the Christian beliefs in the afterlife which are very different to what had been the norm at the time did those beliefs also play a role in the growth of Christianity uh they certainly appear to um the modern idea of a fire and brimstone serve sermon goes all the way back um uh you find it in fact interestingly in a number of accounts of people converting uh from the ancient world one of the things I did in working on my book on the Triumph of Christianity is I looked up every ancient conversion account that that exists so far as I know and you know and tried to figure out why you know why are people converting and and in almost every case it's because they believe the Christians can do Miracles or their God does Miracles better than the Pagan Miracle so um but the other reason is because these Christians will do a miracle and they'll say uh okay our God is more powerful but he's not only more powerful in this life he's powerful in the Life to Come and if you don't believe in him you're going to face torment and so Christians start preaching Heaven and Hell it's an interesting strategy because pagans by and large didn't believe in an afterlife and so how do you convince somebody about heaven and hell if they don't that isn't even within their their categories well the way you do it is um you it's it's like a it's like somebody a Salesman who has a new product doing something that nobody's ever seen done before you know like you invent a dishwasher for example and nobody's heard of a dishwasher or a dishwasher to your husband you know or something you know but now you've got a a dishwasher and you create the need for the thing so that somebody feels they need it even though they didn't know they needed it and so you create the sense that you've got to escape heaven and hell even among people who've never even heard of Heaven and Hell and so you create the need and then you feel you're the one who feels the need and so that's how they did it and so yeah preaching Heaven hell was a big deal that's remarkable and the last question I had before we moved on how many conversion accounts do we have from antiquity well we you know we don't have millions of them but we have some and in a variety of texts going back to the New Testament um the first um well the first conversion account we hear of is Paul our first Christian Author says that that he saw Jesus alive after his death okay so that's a miracle and that's that's what converts him um when you uh when Paul writes his letters he himself says to his congregations that he needs them to remember that he did signs and miracles among them so he was confronting people by doing Miracles I'm a boy we wish we knew what that was all about but when you get to the book of Acts our first account of the spread of Christianity now this is not a letter uh it's a narrative and a lot of it is legendary but whenever people convert in the book of Acts when the apostles convert somebody It's Always by doing a miracle starting on the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2 a miracle happens and thousands of people convert few days later Peter healed somebody in the temple somebody who's always been been lame unable to walk and he heals him and everybody realizes that he's healed this person through the power of Jesus and thousands of people convert and through hacks all of these people converting it's always because of Miracles and when you get outside of the New Testament it's the same thing you have all these stories about the apostles that are legendary but in every case they're converting people through Miracles and even in um in writers who are very intelligent Highly Educated sensible writers they tell us it's because of Miracles Saint Augustine in the 5th Century has a long section in his book The City of God that explains all of these Miracles that are happening that are converting people and so so that so I think um I there are conversion accounts there are very few that are historical in nature there are a lot of legendary ones and there are lots of ones that people talk about um but in in most cases it has to do with the power of God that's really really interesting thank you so much uh we're going to take a brief break and then we will be back with some more information about the upcoming conference new insights into the New Testament and then Bart is getting on his soapbox this is Bart's weekly update where we get to catch up on all the latest about Dr ehrmann's book releases speaking engagements hermanblog.org happenings and online course launches wondered where the New Testament really came from were the books action actually written by Matthew Mark Luke and John as everyone seems to say the answers to these questions may surprise you in fact what you discover May challenge everything you thought you knew about the Gospels if you're ready to learn the historical truth then you won't want to miss Bart ehrmann's free webinar did Matthew Mark Luke and John actually write Matthew Mark Luke and John in this 50-minute talk with q a you'll learn answers to some of the most intriguing questions surrounding the gospel's authorship such as why did early Christians say the gospels were written by Matthew Mark Luke and John if they're anonymous what's the best evidence that the gospels were written by the apostles were the apostles of Jesus educated well enough to write books and last if the apostles did not write the gospels who did and where did they get their information don't miss your chance to uncover the truth behind the Gospels sign up now for free lifetime access to did Matthew Mark Luke and John actually write Matthew Mark Luke and John at barterman.com forward slash authors thank you and we are back talking about the conference but we've got two more presenters to talk about today uh first up is Dale Allison who will be talking on Echoes of antiquity Old Testament threads woven into the Gospels yeah so this this conference is going to be great uh so it's this is a Bible Conference by Scholars given to non-scholers and uh these are the top Scholars some some of the top Scholars anywhere in the in the known Cosmos and they know how to communicate to regular old folk and so all of the talks will be on the gospels or and Jesus and the gospels and um uh and Dale Allison uh dale dale Allison is Emeritus now from uh Princeton theological seminar he's he's my age we're we're um we're content we're absolute contemporaries I if if I had to pick somebody that I would say is probably the most highly respected scholar of Jesus in the gospels in the Country Dale if he's not number one he's right up there I don't know who else would be above him he's he's he is the real deal so he so his lecture he's giving this election he's given this thing on Echoes of the Old Testament in the gospel of Matthew I don't know exactly what he's going to say but it's a very rich topic and he he's written the he and uh his his mentor in graduate school wrote the authoritative multi-volume three-volume commentary on the gospel of Matthew a very learned it erudite thing and he wrote us one of his early books was about how Jesus is being portrayed by Old Testament Illusions in Matthew as somebody like Moses and and he knows this stuff inside out so this is this is going to be a good lecture by somebody who is is just absolutely as good as you can get one of my favorite things actually about studying ancient literature is looking at the interplay between old texts and new texts and how motifs and themes are kind of Taken and woven through um yeah well you know literature is really interesting well these early Christian authors they of course knew the the Hebrew Bible and if they when they knew it well man they could use it in ways it some ways you don't even notice like you wouldn't notice unless you really know the Old Testament yourself and Dale Dale's going to show some of that some of those ways yeah yeah it's really intertextuality really good yeah uh Robin Walsh is also going to be doing a presentation and she I interviewed her a couple of weeks ago for the podcast but the title of her presentation is from illiteracy to inspiration unveiling the minds behind the Gospels yeah so Robin so Dale and I uh Dale house and I are a couple of the old geezers in the field and Robin Robin is this uh Rising Star she's she's written this book on um understanding the gospels uh understanding the gospels as literature within the Greek and Roman worlds that um came out a few years ago uh it's I think it's a revision of her dissertation that she did at Brown University and people are talking about this book more than any book on the New Testament I've heard I've heard in years because people think this is really interesting it's going an entirely New Direction on how how to deal with um who the authors what we know about the authors of the New Testament based on inference and she argues that the inferences we've drawn that people like me have drawn are wrong and so and so her lecture will be uh I think is going to be related related to that that issue that you find in her on in her book on early Christian literature that came out a few years ago and she's a very she's very sharp as people know if they watched your podcast and she's very interesting and she knows a lot and so I'm that that's one I'm really really looking forward to yeah me too and for those who are interested in in what we're talking about this is new insights into the new testament which is a conference an online conference aimed exclusively and explicitly at non-academics so you do not need to have even an undergraduate degree in New Testament scholarship or the history of religion or anything to attend and to understand and enjoy yourselves all these presentations are aimed at lay people with no prior understanding or knowledge and it will run from the 23rd to the 24th of September there are a total of 10 Scholars who will be presenting and each week we're going through a couple of them to give you a bit of a taste of what you can expect the cost is 59.95 the early bird pricing is 49.95 and that's available until uh Saturday August 26th and you can read more or sign up at www.ntconference.org and now Bart is going to get on his soapbox take cover fundamentalist Christians and mythicists it's time for Bart gets on his soapbox the segment where Bart exposes the belief systems and social constructs that frustrate him most but what are you soapboxing about this week right so I did a um I did a we called it a course on July 23rd that was a four lecture uh course that I did that was was largely autobiographical I called it why I'm not a Christian uh how leaving the faith uh led to a life of more purpose and meaning and so I um uh this was about you know how I left the Christian faith and I dealt with how I got into the faith and then by converting to be a born-again Christian when I was a teenager and then and then end up leaving the faith not I deal with my scholarship in these talks but I also talk about how the scholarship didn't lead me away from the faith what led me away from the faith was my uh trying to wrestle with why there's so much pain and misery in the world so about 30 years ago I left the faith and one of the things I talked about there like it's still irritating me now you know now that I brought it up again to my my audience then and started thinking about it I'm still irritated about it that's why I thought I'd talk about this on my soapbox here which is you know so I was I was really committed your Evangelical Christian a very committed conservative Evangelical Christian and eventually then I became a um became an agnostic and atheist I uh and so that's what I am now uh and so uh what the thing that I'm I get upset about is people telling me why I left the faith who don't know me that's all the time I get emails from people who wouldn't I mean they wouldn't know me from Adam I mean I'm a little bit younger than Adam but it's like they know nothing about me and so I'll be talking one of the things I'm always told is that you know you you just you know you you over intellectualize the faith you didn't have any kind of spiritual relationship with God you were you know you're just one of these intellectual Geeks and so you know when you found some contradictions you left the faith what that's not even true I mean it's just like even it's not true I when I when I started finding contradictions and things I changed my understanding of the Bible but I was a Christian for years and years after that there's a scholar there's a I'm not going to name him there's there are Scholars who've mentioned in their books about why I left the faith that are just completely wrong including friends of mine I have a friend who wrote an academic friend of mine Evangelical who wrote a book claiming that I left Christianity became an atheist when I realized that the manuscripts of the New Testament had differences among them what are you crazy I knew that when I was at Moody Bible Institute are you and so people have but the other the big one that people always say the one the most common is people say look the reason you left the faith is because you started out as a fundamentalist and when your fundamentalist assumptions were undermined then you thought you had to leave the faith if you had been a Christian like me where I don't have fundamentalist assumptions then you never would have left the faith because you wouldn't you'd realize that these problems aren't really the big problems and again I mean look I spent 15 I was raised in a church I was I was active in the church for all my life until I was 15 when I wasn't a fundamentalist as a fundamentalist for uh I don't know seven nine years and uh Then I then I was a I was a moderate Mainline Christian it wasn't a fundamentalist at all a very liberal Christian for years and years and so I don't know people um so there's no real reason they should get under my skin but it really does because I think what it does is people people try to explain why someone who knows about the faith would leave it and they can't believe they'd actually like have reasons it must be because something's weird about them you know they're too fundamentalists or they're too intellectual or something and you know I so I I'm not you know I don't in this course I don't at all encourage anybody to leave the faith or you know or to convert or to deconfer to anything I was just telling my own story but you know if somebody wants to kind of attack my story they ought to at least get the story right that's what I'd suggest all right yeah so I'm sorry I probably assume it's all about me obviously that's a reasonable thing to get irate about um Josh gets similar accusations leveled at him quite regularly and you've left because you just want to sin and I'm like you I I think I get more irate about it than than he does it's just the level of arrogance I think you have to have to assume that you know someone else's mind and religious Journey better than they possibly could is quite breathtaking it is I frankly do not get I do not frequently get you just left so you could sin I think people know that I'm just you know as moral or immoral as I was before well thank you very much for sharing that um but and before we finish for the week could you just summarize what we spoke about um and again give people the name of of the book where they can find out some more yeah the book the book is called the Triumph of Christianity it's written for for a general audience it's not written for Scholars it's written to explain how it worked because if if the New Testaments right which I think it has to be in this case that the followers of Jesus started out as a small group of maybe 20 people after his death who thought he had been raised from the dead that's the first group within 300 years it's something like three million people and then it keeps growing and by the end of the fourth Century it's 30 million people and how do you explain that uh is it a miracle you know that's what some people would say or is it or are there explanations for it on the historical realm and I try to explain historically in the book and here on the podcast what how it happened people were convinced that the Christian God was more powerful than the pagan gods they convinced a few people here and there and over time the numbers started uh avalanching and it ended up taking over the Western World in part because these Christians unlike virtually everybody else in the ancient world were Evangelistic trying to convert people to their faith and they insisted that they had the only right answer and so if you combine those two things if you convince anybody as you're trying to do then they leave their their other religions and they become a Christian and over time that leads to the Triumph of Christianity but thank you so much for sharing your time and knowledge audience thank you for listening I hope you enjoyed the show if you did please subscribe to the podcast to make sure you don't miss future episodes remember also that you can use the code MJ podcast for a discount on all of Bart's courses over at www.barterman.com and if you are interested in signing up for the new insights into the New Testament conference that is over at www.ntconference.org I wanted to make sure I gave you the right address there misquoting Jesus will be back next week but what are we talking about next time we are we are getting to the heart of what I do next time uh I am uh I'm a I've been a new testament scholar for a very long time and many people don't understand what that actually means what is New Testament scholarship and like how's it different from just reading the Bible and and what and how did it you know where where did it come from how did it start and it's a very very interesting story how a scholarship in the New Testament began and developed and what it what it has led to and it's not a widely known story and so that's that's what we'll be talking about thank you all and goodbye has been an episode of misquoting Jesus with Bart um we'll be back with a new episode next Tuesday so please be sure to subscribe to our show for free on your favorite podcast listening app or on barterman's YouTube channel so you don't miss out from Bart Hermann and myself Megan Lewis thank you for joining us